Being a contributor is where new members start. A contributor makes contributions to Cordova, but those contributions must be reviewed and applied to the repositories by someone who has write access directly to the repositories - the committers. Contributors have read access and can submit requests for code changes, but those requests are handled by committers. Contributors do not have write access to the repositories. The project needs contributors, and every committer started as a contributor. You do not need to be a committer to make valuable and important contributions to the project - contributors can do that. A request for a code change is called a "pull request", as it is a request for a committer to pull in the contributor's changes.

After a contributor has established a track record of quality changes and understanding, they can request to be a committer. A committer has write access directly to the repositories, so their changes hit the stream immediately. Committers also process pull requests from contributors. They also review and address unresolved Jira items. And they participate in discussions on the mailing list. Steady growth of committers is considered an indicator of good health in a project. If you are going to be in the community for the long term and submit ongoing code changes, you should consider becoming a committer. It's easier than you think.

= Becoming A Committer =

* Sign up for the Cordova dev mailing list. See http://cordova.io. * Sign up for the Cordova issue tracker (JIRA). See http://issues.cordova.io. * Become active on the mailing list! It's important to keep up-to-date on the latest issues the developer community is dealing with. * Ask on the mailing list (optionally check out the issue tracker) about where you can help out. Some of the most appreciated contributions include: * Documentation. Under the issue tracker, do a search for issues and filter by Component: Docs. These are usually simple, text-editing issues that are a good introduction to the project! * Tests. There is a mobile-spec repository (Component: Mobile-spec under the issue tracker) containing the HTML5-based tests for the Cordova API. * Code. Each platform is filed as a Component in the issue tracker. If you have a platform preference, have a look at the outstanding issues for that platform. * Send a message to the Cordova mailing list asking to become a committer once you have successfully contributed code and it has been merged in. * The committers will start a private vote thread discussing and voting on your potential committership, based on these guidelines and any other concerns the committers have. * If no -1 votes come up, you will be notified!

= Voting In a New Committer =

* Committers & PMCs are different roles. Generally, we invite & vote to join both at the same time. * In general, Cordova follows [[http://community.apache.org/newcommitter.html|community.apache.org's New Committer]] guidelines. This document covers the details of starting voting threads, making account creation requests, and all that fun stuff. * If the vote passes: * Notify board of vote results (if PMC offered): [[http://www.apache.org/dev/pmc.html#newpmc|http://www.apache.org/dev/pmc.html#newpmc]] * After 72 hours, send an offer to become a committer with @private CC'ed ([[http://community.apache.org/newcommitter.html#committer-invite-template|template]]) * If they accept: * Add the committer to the [[who|Who's who wiki article]]. * The committer should be added to the PMC list on JIRA.